Free Rifters 2 - Maelstrom by Peter Watts Page A

food not agree with you?"
    "I hate you," he hissed.
    "You don't even know me."
    "I know you," he spat. "I know your people . I know—"
    "You don't know shit. If you did—if you really had such a hard-on for my people as you call them—you'd be bending over backwards to help me."
    He stared at her, a flicker of uncertainty on his face.
    She kept her voice low. "Suppose you're right, Amitav. Suppose I've come all the way up from the deep sea. The Axial Volcano, even, if you know where that is."
    She waited. "Go on," he said.
    "Let's also say, hypothetically, that the quake was no accident. Someone set off a nuke and all those shockwaves just sort of daisy-chained their way back to the coast."
    "And why would anyone do such a thing?"
    "Theirs to know. Ours to find out."
    Amitav was silent.
    "With me so far? Bomb goes off in the deep sea. I come from the deep sea. What does that make me, Amitav? Am I the bad guy here? Did I trip the switch, and if I did, wouldn't I at least have planned a better escape than swimming across three hundred kilometers of fucking mud, without so much as a fucking sandwich, only to crawl up onto your fucking Strip after a fucking week to get stuck listening to your fucking whining? Does that make any sense at all ?
    "Or," —the voice leveling now, coming back under control— "did I just get screwed like everyone else, only I managed to get out alive? That might be enough to inspire a bit of ill-will even in a white N'AmPac have-it-all bitch like myself, don't you think?"
    And somebody , she promised herself, is going to pay.
    Amitav said nothing. He watched her with his sunken eyes, his expression gone blank and unfathomable once more.
    Clarke sighed. "Do you really want to fuck with me, Amitav? Do you want to fuck with the people who did hit the switch? They don't exactly have a light touch when it comes to cleaning up their messes. Right now they think I'm dead. Do you want to be around me when they find I'm not?"
    "And what is it about you," Amitav said at last, "that makes our lives so unimportant?"
    She'd thought a lot about that. It had led her back to a bright shining moment of discovery she'd had as a child. She'd been astonished to learn that there was life on the moon: microscopic life, some kind of bacterium that had hitched a ride with the first unmanned probes. It had survived years of starvation in hard vacuum, frozen, boiled, pelted by an unending sleet of hard radiation.
    Life, she'd learned, could survive anything. At the time it had been cause for hope.
    "I think that maybe there's something inside me," she said now. "I think—"
    Something brushed against her leg.
    Her arm lashed out reflexively. Her fist clenched around the wrist of a young boy.
    He'd been going for the gas billy on her calf.
    "Ah," Clarke said. "Of course."
    The boy stared back at her, petrified.
    She turned back to Amitav; the child whimpered and squirmed in her grip. "Friend of yours?"
    "I, ah—"
    "Little diversionary tactic, perhaps? You don't have the balls to take me on, and none of your grown-up buddies will help out, so you use a fucking child ?" She yanked on the small arm: the boy yelped.
    Sleepers stirred in the distance, used to chronic disturbance. None seemed to fully awaken.
    "Why should you care?" Amitav hissed. "It is not a weapon, you said so yourself. Am I a fool, to believe such claims when you come here waving it like an ataghan? What is it? A shockprod?"
    "I'll show you," she said.
    She bent, still gripping the child. A depolarizing blade protruded from the tip of her glove like a gray fingernail; at its touch, the sheath on her calf split as if scalpeled. The billy slid easily into her grip, a blunt ebony rod with a fluorescent band at the base of the handgrip.
    Amitav raised his hands, suddenly placating. "There is no need—"
    "Ah, but there is. Come in close, now."
    Amitav took a step back.
    "It works on contact," Clarke said. "Injects compressed gas. Comes in handy down on the rift,